Micanopy in Shadow

by Ann Cook

  Grant followed Brandy into the room. She had pictured an Aunt Jemima figure in a rocking chair, hands folded, hair in a bun, much like the postmistress. She was wrong. Mattie Washington was tall and rawboned, her scant hair silver and cropped short. She sat bolt upright in a straight chair in front of a darkened fireplace, a wooden cane propped against a spindly little table beside her and her bony hands in constant motion. The knitting that lay on the table was not unexpected, but the stack of Popular Mechanics beside it was. Mrs. Washington noticed Brandy glance at the magazines.

  “Used to have a little ole’ piece of a husband, but he couldn’t fix nothing hisself. I could. That ole’ truck out there—I put it together by myself. Still read up on it.” She picked up the knitting needles. “He’s gone now.” Brandy didn’t inquire whether the gentleman had simply left, or whether he died. The vocabulary of Southerners, no matter their social status, did not usually acknowledge death.

  Mrs. Washington’s sinewy fingers, knuckles swollen, clicked the needles rapidly back and forth. A baby’s blue cap began to emerge.

  “I reckon you be Sheshauna’s friend.” The old woman’s ebony skin stretched like wrinkled parchment over a flat nose and prominent eye ridges. Her head bristled with shorn hair, exposing the angles of her skull. The room was cool, and Mrs. Washington wore a ragged knit sweater over her long blue and white print housedress. She had tied a white apron around her narrow waist. Her gaze lifted from the yarn to Brandy’s face and fastened there.

  Brandy drew up another straight chair. “Sheshauna said I could come. I’m glad you’ll take time to talk to me.” The old lady’s glance shifted to Grant, who leaned against a wall on the other side of the fireplace next to a cheap print of a white crucified Christ.

  “This is Grant Wilson. He’s a friend and a ranger at Paynes Prairie. He drove me over today. Here.” Brandy reached into her bag and pulled out the package of bacon. “For your time, we brought a little something from the store in Evinton.”

  Mrs. Washington set the knitting on the end table and pushed herself up from her chair. She took the wrapped package. “Much obliged,” she said, still not smiling, and hobbled across the floor.

  “I’ll just set it in the icebox.” The apartment-sized refrigerator looked vintage 1940s.

  They waited until Mrs. Washington again took her seat and picked up her knitting. She looked directly at Grant. “You kin to old Savage Wilson?”

  Brandy remembered a line from MacBeth about his followers: “There’s not a one of them but in his house I keep a servant fee’d.” Black servants had worked in the homes of Micanopy’s white citizens for generations, and scarcely been noticed. They must have accumulated volumes of information about their employers but kept their counsel among themselves—no doubt hugely entertained at each white family’s foibles. Who could blame them?

  Mrs. Washington sat silent for several seconds, deep-set eyes focused on her lap. The needles flew. Brandy looked around, waiting to see if Grant’s presence would cancel the whole interview. A faint odor she couldn’t identify wafted from a covered iron pot on the wood stove—something like cooked chicken, only more pungent. She wondered if it were squirrel, or even armadillo.

  The room was as neat as any she had ever visited: the floor swept and burnished as if with an oily mop, the fireplace bare of kindling or ashes, the white doilies on the arms of the shabby sofa exactly placed. Two photographs of children were the only decorations on the sideboard. In one corner beside the refrigerator stood a white enamel sink on legs and a wooden table, covered with a red plaid plastic tablecloth. In the other a small television sat on a low cabinet.

  At the old lady’s feet lay a spotless, multi-colored rag rug and another in front of the door. A single band of sunlight stretched under the side window, where a fat yellow cat sunned itself on the bare floor. Its ears twitched when Mrs. Washington spoke but its eyes remained closed.

  “Tabby there,” the old lady said, following Brandy’s gaze, “she keeps out the varmints.”

  Out the closest window Brandy could see the tilled soil of a small vegetable garden, fenced with chicken wire. The leaves of collard greens in neat rows reached a foot high. Tall stalks, laden with red tomatoes, leaned against their stakes.

  Brandy thought of her grandmother’s plump black-and-white Patches. “I like cats,” she said. “They’ll keep watch if you don’t have a dog. Does your cat get along with your dog?”

  “Best of pals,” the old lady said, then retreated into her own thoughts. At last she said, “I didn’t look for any kin of Savage Wilson’s comin’, but I’ve studied on it. Don’t reckon it matters no more. Every soul’s gone might be hurt. It’s about time somebody else knowed the whole story.” She glanced at Brandy. “You’re the great-granddaughter of the lady who drowned in ’21?”

  Brandy nodded.

  The clicking halted. For a second, Mrs. Washington’s full lips pressed together. “All I knows come from that poor chile’ worked across the street from the old Baptist Church. She was plumb scared to death. But when the story come out in the newspaper, she told her mama what she seen. After a spell, her mama told other folks.” She looked up, her gaze piercing. “Not white folks, of course.”

  Brandy’s heart thudded. “And why was that?”

  Her dark eyes stared at Grant. “Because of that town marshall, because of Savage Wilson’s father, Zeke.”

  SIXTEEN

  The knitting needles began to move again, more slowly. “Likely you don’t know about the Klan in them days. My mama said they was whoopin’ and hollerin’ and ridin’ through town ever whipstitch, scaring poor colored folks plumb to death. Lots of them come over in their Model Ts from Williston, but we had home-grown Klan, too. That poor little young ‘un Rosebud was hardly fifteen. Her daddy, he’d been throwed in that stinkin’ jail by the Klan, and a cousin strung up not far from town a couple of years before that. A colored man—or a Jew fella—didn’t have to do nothin’. They just had to think he did.” She paused and looked away.

  Brandy hesitated, looking for the connection. She had taken her note pad and pencil out of her canvas bag and was trying to make notes without alarming Mrs. Washington. “You’re saying Wilson was a Klansman?” she asked, conscious of Grant. He shifted his weight to the other foot and crossed his arms, standing now a few inches away from the wall.

  Mrs. Washington’s voice rose. “They knowed he was.”

  “But could they know absolutely? Even then, nobody published membership lists.”

  Shrewd dark eyes glanced up at Brandy. “They knowed. A nice Jew shoemaker in Gainesville, he made Wilson’s special boots. Used some kinda special deep brown, hand-stitched leather. It made them strong so’s they’d last a long time—and soft. Oh, that lawman loved them boots! The Klan was always after Jews, too, but white folks, they needed they skills, same as whites needed the coloreds’. The shoemaker saw a passel of Klansmen in a parade one night. You know them white robes and hoods? He said they was no mistaking them boots under one fellow’s long ole’ robe. He knowed then the marshall was in the Klan. The word spread.”

  Mrs. Washington now laid the baby’s cap down. Piercing eyes gazed directly into Brandy’s. Once she decided to tell her story, she seemed determined to be heard. “My mama was a cousin of Rosebud’s mama. Rosebud told her she seen a white woman laying in the grass beside the road. A big car stopped—poor little Rosebud didn’t know what kind, didn’t know a thing about cars. But somebody got out. Had to be a white person. No coloreds here had cars in them days.”

  The old lady gave her head a decisive shake. “Rosebud said that same somebody commenced dragging the woman along the ground. Well, Rosebud, she run. She run home fast as a jackrabbit and didn’t stick her head outdoors again that night. When the story come out in the paper, folks talked about it. Rosebud knew she’d seen the lady dragged to the pond.”

 
Brandy caught her breath. Her pencil paused. That meant Rosebud saw Ada right before she drowned. Brandy’s thoughts rushed back to the medium. Adele Marco said two people handled the prayer book and the pendant, but only one of them handled both. Ada herself certainly held both. Someone else was involved in Ada’s drowning, but that person didn’t handle both the prayer book and the piece of jewelry. The medium also said the pendant gave off an aura of horror—of violence so awful she couldn’t continue the reading. And Ada had been wearing the pendant when she died. Of course, John would say these were coincidences or educated guesses, or both.

  Still, Brandy felt vindicated. A witness had verified the medium’s reading. It gave her momentary shivers. “You’ve confirmed something I strongly suspected,” Brandy said. She hoped her voice was not shaky. “My great-grandmother wasn’t a suicide. She didn’t abandon her daughter.”

  One fact puzzled Brandy. “What on earth could Wilson do to Rosebud if she reported what she saw?”

  “Oh, Miz Able. You don’t know the Klan, not like they was in them days. A little colored girl tellin’ a Klansman that some white person done lied about a crime? That some white person likely drowned that woman?” She gave a decisive shake of her head.

  Grant stirred once more but did not speak.

  “So the black community stayed quiet all these years, knowing someone drowned my great-grandmother?”

  “Seems a sorry way to treat the chile’ left behind, I knows. But her mama was dead. Rosebud didn’t know who the lady was or why she was drowned or who the other person was. But if she did tell what she saw, the Klan would fall on her and her whole family like a blamed freight train. They’d say she was lying. Rosebud and her mama, they wouldn’t risk it.” She glanced down and picked up the needles again. Her voice grew calmer. “Later, I reckon it didn’t seem to matter much. Some good folks took in the little girl, and she was doin’ fine. Didn’t seem like the truth could help anyone, and it could sure as shootin’ hurt Rosebud and her family.”

  Brandy sighed, but she didn’t criticize the testimony delay further. At least the story had now come out.

  Grant moved over to sit in a straight chair beside the kitchen table. “I believe Mrs. Able wanted to ask about another crime, too,” he said, “one that took place about the same time. She thinks you might know about it, too. Did anyone in your community work at the Stark Dry Goods Store in those days?”

  Did Grant really wanted to remind Mrs. Washington of the Stark case, or did he simply want to change the subject? “The town marshall would be first responder in both cases,” Brandy said.

  Darker clouds had rolled in and sunlight had vanished along with the bright spot on the living room floor. The saffron yellow cat rose, stretched, and ambled toward the door. As the needles clicked again, the blue baby cap came alive under Mrs. Washington’s agile fingers.

  But she hadn’t overlooked Grant’s question. “Neighbor boy, they say, worked there, sweepin’ up, stockin’ shelves and the like. I heard my uncle talk about him. He moved away, went to some kinfolks in Georgia right after that killin’—the revenuer’s.” She cut her eyes around at Brandy, a knowing half-smile on her lips. “The day after the fella was in the store, the boy done cleaned up a bloodstain on the floor in the back office. He told the marshall about it.” She rolled her eyes. “That revenue man, he was never seen again. They all knowed that.”

  Brandy recalled the newspaper story written at the time. A handyman said he saw Ada step into a car after she left the dry goods store. Probably the handyman washed up the bloodstain the next day. Too bad the Sheriff’s Office couldn’t test for DNA then.

  “Was the bloodstain ever connected to the agent’s disappearance?”

  The hint of a smile came and went again on the old lady’s lips. She cocked her head. “Don’t reckon the mens figured it was important. Mr. Stark, he claimed he killed and cleaned a chicken in the store that day. They let the boy move away. He never testified or nothin’.”

  Brandy wondered if old Caleb encouraged the boy to move away—either bribed or threatened him. “I talked to the present Caleb Stark,” she said. “He never mentioned the revenue agent’s murder, although he did know my great-grandmother was in the store the same day.”

  “Lands, chile’, you don’t know much about them Starks! Pure white trash, they was. They come up a bit in the world since. The law claimed they couldn’t prove who done that killin’. But they was plenty of talk. Folks said Mr. Stark had a lotta reasons to want that man off his back.” She cut her eyes around at Grant, sitting stiffly at the table. “Some folks figured money changed hands. But the mens, they didn’t care. They all wanted that revenuer gone.”

  Brandy dropped her gaze. Early twentieth century Florida was rife with corrupt law enforcement officers. Grant wouldn’t want to hear that. In any case the old lady’s second and third hand information might not be reliable.

  Mrs. Washington switched topics herself. She was on a roll, reliving the glory days of Micanopy. “In them days we had mighty fine folks here, too. Rich folks like Dr. Payne and Mr. Irons and the McCredies in they fine homes. A lawyer had a office right downtown.”

  Brandy smiled encouragingly. “My husband’s handling the restoration of the Irons homestead.”

  Servants of all kinds and household maids must have worked in the major businesses and most of the homes then, and they would all be black. Some would surely gossip, especially if they held a grudge against their employers.

  The old lady pursed her lips. “They was hard folks to work for, I heard, the Irons folks, but quality.”

  “What were the complaints about the family?”

  “Oh, lordy, that woman was so high and mighty! Her own people lost all they money in the big freeze of ’94.” She glanced up. “That’d be 1894, of course. But the Ironses, now, they didn’t depend just on groves. They had farmland up at Paynes Prairie, and cattle, too. Mr. Irons, he was the one with the money, not her. But she put on airs, and the poor woman, the one worked for her—cleanin’ and washin’ and mendin’ and ironin’—she had it hard. Couldn’t please her. Finally, my mama’s friend just up and quit.”

  Brandy prodded, although the World War I veteran was the one who interested her. “And why did she finally quit?”

  “Well, you work in a lady’s house you gets to know a lot they just as soon you didn’t. Truth was, Mrs. High and Mighty Irons and her husband, they didn’t get along. The woman workin’ there all day would hear him shoutin’ at her a lot. He had an awful temper, Mr. Irons. One time she come over to wash and iron, and she found a blouse in the wash been tore right down the front. Dirty, too. Well, I tell you, it put an ugly thought in her head about the mister. Mrs. Irons wanted her to mend that blouse and make it like new, and the woman said she just couldn’t. It was tore too bad. She told Mrs. Irons, ‘Just go buy another blouse, Ma’am.’”

  “Seems reasonable.”

  “Well, that wasn’t what Mrs. Irons wanted. She commenced saying the blouse had to be mended. The cleanin’ woman put down her washboard and soap—‘course in them days they washed in a tub in the yard—and said she was quittin’.” Mrs. Washington’s head bobbed up and down with emphasis. “And she up and did.”

  “What do you suppose the trouble was between the couple?”

  “Don’t reckon nobody outside the family knowed. But they said his fussin’ started only a couple of years after they married. Everybody knowed she had her cap set for him for years. Got him soon as the poor soul come back from the war, bad hurt. Well …” she shifted her eyes around at Brandy in what had become a familiar gesture and raised her eyebrows. “I reckon you knows they only had the one young ‘un. In them days, that meant something. They had separate bedrooms. Now, rich folks sometimes had separate rooms, but not in Micanopy. None I know of.”

  Brandy heard the sound of a car engine, not far down the isola
ted road. The noise stopped almost as soon as it started, and the dog gave a puzzled “ruff.” The cat rose and padded toward the door again, ears perked forward.

  “Are you expecting more company?” Brandy asked. With a jolt, she remembered the little silver car.

  “Lordy. no. My granddaughter already dropped by today. Don’t get much company. Maybe that’s why I run on so this afternoon.” She peered at the door without stirring from her chair.” Maybe some poor soul got lost. They do sometimes.”

  Grant stood, walked to the door, and opened it. An irritated growl rumbled in the hound’s throat. For a few minutes he peered down the ruts of the two-track road. His pickup parked beside a live oak was the only vehicle in sight except for Mrs. Washington’s. The wind had risen. Long strands of Spanish moss swayed on its low branches, scraping the little truck’s roof. The smell of rain hung in the air. Brandy was glad now of Grant’s presence. She wouldn’t relish navigating these shadowy backwoods roads alone. Would she have noticed the silver car this afternoon?

  Brandy stood also. “It’s about time we went along.” Grant held the door open. Brandy listened, but she didn’t hear the engine again.

  “Aren’t you a little nervous, living out here like this?” she asked. Brandy pictured her sitting alone at her table night after night, a bowl of steaming soup with its curious odor rising before her. What did she do during the long evenings? There was, of course, the tiny television set in the corner, and her ragged copies of Popular Mechanics on the little table at her elbow.

  “Me and Tabby and the hound dog be fine,” Mrs. Washington said. “Been my home since I was a young’un. Papa farmed this land. I own the place now. Don’t see no need to move. I grow a lot of my vittles right outside my door. Reckon I be safe enough.” She gave a short laugh. “Folks in these parts knows I ain’t got nothing worth stealin’.” She cut her eyes again at Brandy. “’Course, word gets out I been talkin’ private stuff, I may go stay with a daughter for a spell.”